


Nothing is Over

by CinnamonLily



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Disabled Stiles, Established Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Good Peter Hale, Loss, M/M, Mates Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Peter just doesn't stay dead, Resurrection, Stiles-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-31 08:20:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12128394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CinnamonLily/pseuds/CinnamonLily
Summary: Stiles had the perfect life, until his mate died. Again. It's been nine months, and he's not doing well. In fact, he resents everyone else's happiness and has become a hermit on autopilot. Somehow, he's forgotten that Peter never stays dead.





	Nothing is Over

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ylith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ylith/gifts).



> This is totally and utterly for Emmy, and a little bit for everyone else who talked about the subject in the Steter Network's Discord. 
> 
> It's unbetaed, but oh well.
> 
> Title borrowed from a Sunrise Avenue song.

 

Stiles wished he could just decide to stop resenting them so much. Sadly, he knew that wasn’t possible.

He sat in the chair everyone thought of as his in the corner of the family room of the rebuilt Hale house, and watched them.

There wasn’t an emergency or anything, it was just a regular Saturday and pack night with full moon to boot. They still got together once or twice a week, barring surprise changes in schedules, just to eat good food and hang out as a pack.

Erica and Boyd cuddled on the huge couch, tired from all the full moon frolicking the pack had indulged in tonight. They were still as stupidly in love as they’d been since they were all teens. Stiles hated himself for resenting them.

The only people he didn’t have actively negative feelings for were Chris, Isaac, and Derek. Chris and Isaac were in France, mostly because Isaac had gotten a nice internship there, and Chris had been the one most available to go with him for moral support.

Derek… well, Derek knew loss in the same way Stiles did, at least almost. Even now, being the second Alpha of the Hale-McCall pack against his will, he seemed to be almost fragile in some ways. Stiles suspected he was the only one who could see that.

Stiles’s resentment was worst towards three people, and they were the ones he would’ve never guessed to hate like this. First was Scott. So maybe it was years since Scotty had been the best bro he’d once been to Stiles. Maybe it had been years since either of them had tried to reclaim that relationship. That was… life, Stiles supposed. It was the fact that Scott still had the love of his life, Allison, with him. And as if that wasn’t enough, they now had a third, with how Kira had slowly gravitated toward them over time.

Stiles watched Scott as he napped on the floor by the couch. Kira stroked his hair while she talked with Allison who sat on the couch behind them. Occasionally, the girls would hold hands and smile at each other in a disgustingly cute way.

Stiles turned his head to stare at the windows across the room.

He’d never thought that one day it could be more than six weeks since he last spoke to Lydia. Or just as much time since he last visited his dad. The pack didn’t talk about that, they knew better. Derek had told Stiles they refrained only because they still wanted to have a relationship with him.

They’d staged an intervention, his dad and Lydia. At least that’s what Stiles thought they’d attempted. He couldn’t be sure, really.

Apparently, they were worried. They wanted him to get better instead of worse. They wanted him to see a therapist. To move on, maybe.

What they didn’t understand was that there was no fucking moving on from losing your mate.

And yes, maybe Lydia’s research was correct, and being a human, he shouldn’t have felt the mating bond at all. But he wasn’t just a human, he was a spark. He had some magic, and all that magic, every last bit of it, was bonded to his mate.

That was just the spark. It was like they’d forgotten how in love Stiles had been. How well his mate had complimented him. His partner in crime, his lover, his fucking _everything._

He’d thought his dad would know better. Apparently not. Apparently losing Stiles’s mom had taught the man absolutely nothing about grief.

The lights flickered in the room, and no surprise there, everyone glanced at Stiles and then quickly away. Yeah, that was his spark without his mate. Extreme emotions made everything electric go haywire around him. Most of the pack didn’t bring their computers to pack nights anymore.

They’d buried his mate in the spring. It had felt like odd sort of blasphemy, putting someone into the ground when the nature was awakening into full bloom again. Now, almost nine months later, Stiles barely noticed the seasons.

He came to pack nights, showed up on supernatural emergencies whenever one happened—rarely these days, luckily—and went on about his life in a weird numb haze.

He and his mate hadn’t lived in the Hale house. It had been mostly for Derek and the McCall part of the pack. His mate had always needed the privacy, enjoyed their little house, their den, more than the vast, airy rooms of the newly built Hale house.

Stiles thought part of it was the fire. He’d been there, Derek hadn’t. Derek didn’t have direct memories of what had happened on the property that day, not like his uncle did.

Something was always missing. In the mornings, the coffee was ready only because Derek had bought him a coffee maker with a timer after he’d started to freak out about waking up and walking into the kitchen.

He worked at home and forgot to eat most of the time. There weren’t magically appearing plates by his elbows around midday, nor were there accompanying kisses on the top of his head, or fond murmurs of “Eat, sweetheart.”

He coded, he ate when he could remember to do so, he took a bath every other evening, (because showers had been _their_ time and he couldn’t shower anymore without a minor breakdown) and went to sleep on the couch in the office with the small TV on.

Derek visited. Helped him out around the house. Fixed the leak in the roof and they’d even painted the outside of the house during one weekend in August, just the two of them, because Stiles still hadn’t wanted anyone else around at that point.

In some ways he was lucky. He’d chosen a profession he could do wherever. Coding and debugging code for gaming companies had seemed an easy thing to do after he’d learned the basics. Games had always interested him, and after a certain little miscommunication with a pair of centaurs few years ago that left him paralyzed from the waist down for months, he’d been happy not to have chosen a more active thing for a job.

He'd healed enough not to need his wheelchair anymore, but his mate had always insisted on keeping one at the house just in case something went wrong again or he strained something. He still had one in the hall closet, folded into a more easily handled size, but he hadn’t needed it in over a year.

He walked with a cane on the days after whatever supernatural shit they had to take care of, though. Anything strenuous like traipsing around the preserve or hell, sometimes even going to get groceries from one of the bigger stores could leave him feeling tired and wobbly. So cane it was.

 

He drove Roscoe home—his mate had had it “pimped” for their second anniversary last year—and went straight to bed. He didn’t have any energy left for a bath, but then he’d probably taken one the previous night, right? Maybe. It didn’t matter.

Lately, very little did. He stared at the ceiling, feeling the ache in his hips and legs from the walking he’d done tonight. It was his heart that hurt the most, though.

He must have fallen asleep for a bit, because he suddenly jerked awake to a sound he couldn’t place. A thump, then another. Almost like knocking, but too slow to be that?

He got to his feet, grimaced when his knees took a moment to get the memo of staying upright, and grabbed his baseball bat from the corner. Then he started toward the sound.

Sometimes he hated that he didn’t have wolf hearing.

The night seemed too silent suddenly. The thumping stopped, but Stiles’s magic told him _something_ was there still. He crept along the hallway and to the front of the house.

Just as he got to the hall, another thump made him jump.

The solid wood front door had glass panels on either side of it. Stiles moved as quietly as he could to one side, so he could peek through the sheer curtain covering the narrow vertical window on the left side.

There was a man there. Or at least he supposed it was a man. It looked human, but the porch light was only so bright, and he couldn’t tell—

Suddenly the form turned its head, and—

“Stiles?” it croaked. “Sweetheart. It’s me.”

“No,” Stiles whispered, grabbing hold of the closest wall when his knees started to give. “No. No, no, no….”

“Call someone,” the achingly familiar voice, raspy as it was, told him. “To check.”

Stiles nodded, not caring if the thing outside saw him, and leaned on the walls on his way back to the bedroom. He’d forgotten his phone there. Stupid. Stupid fucking thing.

He sat heavily on the bed and fumbled with the phone, before managing—barely—to call Derek.

“Stiles, what’s wrong?”

“You asleep?”

“No, I was reading. What’s going on?” Derek’s voice was full of worry now.

“Go check the grave for me,” Stiles said, only realizing that he was shaking when the bat bounced off the bed and clattered to the floor.

“What…?” He could hear Derek move now, the jingle of keys, he thought.

“P-please, Derek,” he stuttered. “Please.”

“I’m running to the spot, okay. I’ll call you in two minutes.”

The call ended, and Stiles shook quietly, trying not to give any room for feelings.

He couldn’t think about maybe having finally gone crazy.

Or this being some cruel joke. A trick of some supernatural thing that had been drawn in by his spark.

And he most certainly couldn’t think about hope.

 

In less than two minutes, his cell rang.

“It’s empty, Stiles,” Derek breathed heavily, gasping for breath after the run.

“W-what?”

“It’s empty. There’s blood, I can smell it, but it’s not much.” Derek didn’t ask what was going on.

“Just his scent? Nothing… hinky?”

“Yeah, just him. I don’t know how he did it this time but….”

“Derek, I gotta go,” Stiles said, already up moving, slowly but surely, toward the front door.

“Okay, call me tomorrow.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

The phone made a thumping sound when it hit the rug in the hallway.

Stiles wrenched the door open, looking at the man leaning heavily to the frame.

“Are you real?” Stiles asked, knowing his mate would never lie to him.

“Oh, Stiles,” Peter rasped. “I’m sorry it took so long. Some things had to align for it to work.”

“You couldn’t have told me you had a backup plan?” Stiles hissed, but he couldn’t help the way his whole body was drawn to Peter.

“Sweetheart, I told you after the third time, didn’t I?”

“As long as I’m alive, you’ll never stay dead,” Stiles repeated the vow Peter had made him after their wedding night, only few weeks from the third time he’d died and then come back.

“Yes. Now, I think I need a shower,” Peter said, aiming for his old snark, but failing miserably.

“Yes. Yes we do,” Stiles answered, choosing to ignore the way his heart thumped several times. “Come on. You stink.”

He supported Peter’s weight on their way to the bathroom. Both of them wobbled a little here and there, but they still managed to make it in one piece.

Peter looked at the collection of shampoos and shower gels that had migrated from the shower to the edge of the normally rarely used tub and sighed.

Stiles ignored him in lieu of stripping and turning on the shower. They’d buried Peter naked, so the only thing his mate was wearing were smudges of dirt and blood.

“How weak are you feeling?” Stiles asked as he tugged Peter into the shower cubicle.

“Nothing that rest and food won’t fix. And being back with my mate.”

Suddenly Stiles remembered something. He left Peter in the shower and grabbed a new toothbrush from the cabinet, then smeared some paste on it. He held it out to a laughing Peter.

“Grave mouth, yes. Thank you dear,” his mate said, grinning still.

“Hey, it’s you who complained about it last time,” Stiles said as he got back into the shower. “Besides, I want to kiss you.”

Peter made a growly sound and started to brush in earnest.

Stiles laughed and leaned against the tiled wall. Then he cried.

This time, he had his mate’s arms to hold him as he did.

 

 


End file.
